When one of the world's largest manufacturers decided to move forward with an "Industry 4.0" Internet of Things strategy, it bet big on Aruba in a $7 million deal that displaced network incumbent Cisco.

The driving force behind the big win that came just two months ago was a desire by the manufacturing customer to power an Internet of Things, industrial automation solution framework, said Michael Dickman, vice president of switching at Aruba and Aruba 8400 product chief.

"The No. 1 and No. 2 benefits are going to be automation of policy that is pushed down into the wired network so they can bring on new Industry 4.0 robots and manufacturing systems," said Dickman of the deal. "They'll now be able to bring that Industry 4.0 experience to the manufacturing floor faster. The networking team will actually be an enabler and accelerator of that intiative. The No. 1 initiative at the company is to move to Industry 4.0 to have dramatically more efficient and higher-quality production. Now the networking team is at the vanguard of that initiative.”

That deal included over 200 core switches—primarily 8320s with about a dozen 8400s—at between 50 and 70 manufacturing facilities. It also includes 4,000 access switches connecting to all of the manufacturing plant equipment—mostly machines, robots and industrial systems. On the software side, it includes a couple of thousand Aruba Airwave (software) licenses, 100,000 ClearPass endpoint licenses with 30 ClearPass appliances.

"Cisco was the incumbent," said Dickman. "HPE Aruba didn't have any of the switching in that account prior to this deal."